Again and again in the patchwork of horror stories which composes our knowledge of the Black Death one of the most striking features has been the speed of recovery shown by the medieval community. In all the manors of the Bishop of Winchester which she studied, Dr Levett found only a very few where tenements remained vacant for more than a few years. On the estates of Crowland Abbey, where eighty-eight holdings were left empty, all but nine of these were quickly taken up; not by peasants from other villages who might have deserted land elsewhere and so left another gap to fill but by people with names already known on the manor who, one must presume, were landless residents before the plague. The estate of the Abbey, in fact, had sufficient surplus of man-power to fill even the huge vacuum left by the plague. At Cuxham, nine out of thirteen half-virgates were still vacant by March 1352 and in this case recourse was had to importing tenants from outside the manor. Within another three years all the vacancies were filled. Yet it would be a mistake to suggest that this was an easy or painless process, or that all areas recovered so completely. At Standon, for instance, one of the worst affected manors of the Earls of March, many tenements stood unoccupied until 1370. Even in the less depopulated areas the balance between work to be done and labour available was bound to be more precarious than in the past. England had consumed her fat and it was going to be far more difficult for it to recover a second time if any fresh strain were imposed.
Such a strain was to be imposed with the second epidemic of bubonic plague in 1361. In the meantime, however, the relatively light incidence of the Black Death among the generations most likely to bear children coupled with the new wealth and economic opportunities released by the great mortality, had produced an unusually high birth rate in the intervening years. A monk of Malmesbury, it is true, remarked that, ‘the women who survived remained for the most part barren during several years’,{470} but the evidence for the statement is obscure. At the most it can be taken as applying only to the period at the end of and immediately after the epidemic when the sense of shock was still in the forefront of men’s minds and they might have deemed procreation offensive to the Almighty. Obviously by 1361 the children of the post-plague years were not yet competent to undertake the work done by their deceased uncles and cousins, but numerically at least the recovery had begun. It was only after 1360, and still more in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, that depopulation began substantially to change the face of England.
Another point to which Thorold Rogers attached particular importance was the ease with which the peasant could escape from his manor in the chaotic conditions of the English countryside in 1349 and 1350. This ever-present if unvoiced threat must have made the landlord far more amenable to the peasants’ pleas for better conditions of work. It is only fair to say, however, that on most manors there was little to stop a villein escaping even before 1349. He probably had only to step over a brook or cross some invisible demarcation line to put himself beyond the reach of his master except through complicated and usually expensive legal processes. Given that the landlord was likely to have had more than enough labour on his estate already, it was unlikely that he would pursue his recreant villein with any vigour. ‘It cannot be urged too often’, wrote Vinogradoff,{471} ‘that the real guarantee against a dispersion of the peasantry lay in the general fairness of the conditions in which it was placed.’
After the Black Death many villeins, viewing enviously the high wages earned by those no longer bound to render predial services, began to think that the conditions in which they were placed were no longer generally fair. Rogers is therefore surely justified in his belief that the Black Death was a stimulus towards greater mobility of labour and hence towards the disintegration of the manorial system. But the legislation which this new mobility provoked to counter it went far towards nullifying this result. For a long time it was accepted doctrine that the Ordinance of Labourers and the subsequent Statute of Labourers were dead letters from the start; ignored by the labourers and treated with indifference or contempt even by the employers themselves. Knighton, with his categoric statement: ‘Labourers were so elated and contentious that they did not pay attention to the command of the King’,{472} was perhaps the father of this thesis, but the vision of the sturdy British peasant standing up stoutly to any interference with his liberties by wicked barons or cold-hearted bureaucrats was calculated to appeal irresistibly to any Whiggish historian. The laws should have failed and therefore they did fail.
